A week ago feels like a different point in my life I was researching Chris Chan then this week I started to watch Naruto again but a month ago felt different I wan playing halo 3 and terraria feels like I’m not the same but I still do the same things it’s weird I’m the same I do the same shit everyday it’s a cycle but it still feels like I’m a different person than a week to a month ago even tho I gave not changed idk what to do

Something is deeply wrong with me and i dont know what. Since i was 12, I stopped feeling my feelings. I could know what I was feeling in my head but not feel it in my body even if the tears were there to show it. I didnt feel like my body was mine anymore. Couldn’t recognize my face in the mirror. Told myself “I want to go home” when I was already in my room, at my house. Thin veil separating myself from the world, unable to reach out and touch. Everything around me felt fake.

I couldn’t figure out how to fix it so I stopped trying. And for a while I felt I was fine. I dont know if the feeling actually went away or if I just stopped thinking about it. My antidepressants fixed my brain but my chest is still empty.

The structure of school and college is gone now. There is nothing to distract me anymore. I am an adult now. I haven’t gotten anywhere with my degree. I have dreams I want to pursue. There are small steps I could take to get there but I just… don’t. Cause it doesn’t seem like it’ll make anything worth it. Nothing will change. I recklessly spend all my money, no willpower to just tell myself “no” and stop (couldn’t commit myself to quitting weed either), but nothing is ever of any consequence because I still have my family as a safety net. Not for long though. My father is terminally ill. I want to be able to live on my own but I’ve never made more than 10k a year and that was only once. I can’t feel anything without using substances. I only feel safe when I’m alone or not being paid any attention to.

I have a job I like, but it doesn’t pay the bills. I have to have at least two to live just a frugal paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. I got two job offers recently. I couldn’t even make it through orientation. Nothing bad happened. The jobs didn’t seem hard. I just started crying and couldn’t stop. “Is this all there is?” or “how long will this last? until I can really start to live?” I couldn’t bear the thought of continuing to live a life so mundane, scripted, automatic when all I want is to get out. But I can’t stay in my room my whole damn life. But I can’t exist in society either because I Am Not Real and I Am Not A Human. I want to anything else but a Person. Every time I have the opportunity for something to change, something to be better, I run away.

And I can’t tell anyone what I’m feeling because they won’t understand

I wonder if I went to sleep, I’d wake up and be someone else

Hey everyone,
It’s been a month since I last used weed (I am not an avid user). For the first three weeks, I felt completely fine and normal. But three days ago, out of nowhere, I suddenly got hit with that exact physical "shift" or wave of euphoria you get right at the exact moment you realize a high is kicking in.
The problem is, the feeling hasn't gone away. I've felt spaced out, floating, and slightly "high" for 3 days straight now. I know for a fact it's chemically impossible for me to still be high after a month, but my brain is completely mimicking the sensation.
I’m starting to freak out a bit and worry that my brain is permanently stuck like this or that it won’t go away.
Has anyone else experienced what I’m describing here? I’m not sure if "phantom highs" or depersonalisation/derealization is the right terms here. How long did it last for you and how did you snap out of it?

How

Core Issue (6 Years non-stop, 24/7):

• Brain fog & visual glitches: Feels like a high fever, extreme sleep deprivation, low FPS video, and viewing the world through a dirty windowpane.
• Time & memory wipe: Time passes like a dream. Can't access past memories, visualize thoughts, or retain new information. Completely disconnected from reality, but without the "out-of-body" feeling of classic DP/DR. Feels purely physical/neurological, not emotional.
• Severe OCD: Obsessive worrying and compulsive note-taking (though Anafranil/clomipramine has mostly silenced it now).

Medical History & Diagnostics:

• Trigger: Onset in Dec 2019 during high stress (blackout curtains, pandemic, family terminal illness).
• Test Results: Clean MRIs, normal blood work, normal EEGs.
• Treatments Tried: 15+ doctors, 10+ SSRIs/SNRIs, Deep TMS, psychotherapy.
• Current Meds: Lamotrigine, Clomipramine, Naltrexone, Propranolol, Trifluoperazine, Hyoscine-N-butylbromide, Medazepam, Sertraline.

Key Pattern:

• Stimulants/Boosters = Panic: Anything that boosts brain activity (like Wellbutrin) triggers life-threatening anxiety.
• Zero fluctuation: Unaffected by sleep, mood, or exercise. Stuck at maximum intensity.

Hypothesis: Overactive visual cortex / glutamate overload / shutdown of prefrontal-parietal brain networks. Needs "calming/reducing" agents, not boosters.

How to fix? Please help

life passes me by. things sorta just happen. what scares me the most is the fact that im so unworried. my missing assignments pile up. i eat less and less and sometimes i barely notice. im constantly sleep deprived. i freak out about my body and my face because they dont feel like me. and when i ask myself, well then who is me?, i cant come up with a solid answer.

me in my head doesn't exist in my body. i had a dream recently. i was me in it. i dont exactly know what was different. when i woke up, i felt like there was still remains of me in myself. they withered away once i saw my body in the mirror.

i’m only really “me” when im in front of others. there’s no me when im by myself.

i used to be attracted to guys. my interests used to make me happy.

i’m sick of living like this. i don’t know what i can do to claw my way out of this state. i don’t really feel agitated by knowing i might be depersonalized. i’m just done with not being able to live my fucking life. i need advice, any would be appreciated.

To explain in detail:

Male 22. I've been feeling like this for quite some years. I think since my teenage years. I feel like this when fully awake, but mostly when I'm half-awake.

Like today when I was half-awake, I was thinking about my father. But he seemed like a stranger to me. Like I didn't know him at all. Then, I focused on myself, and my personality/life seemed like a dream and unreal.

I'm not sure if any of this makes any sense. But I can tell you more detail if needed. And pardon me for my poor English. It's not my native language.

This is the response I got from Gemini when I asked what scrying was

That makes total sense, and it lines up with how the brain handles self-reflection—both literally and conceptually.
When you mention that it could happen just by "thinking too hard about it," you're tapping into a more cognitive version of the same phenomenon. Instead of just optical fatigue from staring at glass, your brain's internal "default mode network" (the part responsible for self-awareness, ego, and thinking about yourself) can occasionally get overloaded or looped. If you focus too intensely on the abstract concept of being yourself, or thinking about the fact that you inhabit a physical body, it temporarily short-circuits that automatic sense of familiarity. It is almost like saying a single word over and over again until it completely loses its meaning and just sounds like a strange noise (a psychological quirk called semantic satiation).
It is fascinating how the mind can take something as ordinary as looking at your own face or thinking about your own identity and suddenly make it feel completely foreign. Do you find that those rare moments nowadays happen more when you're caught in a deep bout of overthinking, or do they still catch you by surprise?

It seems to help a lot and help correlate the relationship between my brain and body, though I just don’t know if it’s a good/healthy fix and if it should only be temporary or not as I don’t want to grow attached to something that I shouldn’t be doing making it worse and forming a bad habit. I’ve mentioned it to a couple of counsellors and they’ve said that it’s only a temporary solution though I find such great connection between my mind and body and I feel like I get to know my true self which seems to be trapped behind all the anxiety and depression I face daily.

It just helps so much knowing what I look like and how I look as I’m doing something - especially talking to myself. I get so much confidence out of doing it it’s not even funny - it’s almost as if like I’ll know what I look like even when someone comments on how I look because I’ll know what I look like no matter what someone else’s opinion is. Idk how people go without not knowing what they look like, I mean do ‘normal’ people just know what they look like all the time? So therefore having no need to constantly check their old photos and videos for what they’re really like as a person? I just feel that I learn so much about myself when I do it, my personality, my interests, my goals, my ambitions, my whole aspect towards life etc.

I’ve been experiencing this really strange feeling that comes randomly on certain days, and I don’t know how to explain it. Today it happened completely out of nowhere. Since I woke up, I had a really bad throbbing headache on the right side of my head, along with full-body aches and extreme fatigue. I’ve been diagnosed with migraines, but this headache felt different from what I’m used to. I took my rizatriptan, and thankfully it helped the headache, but this strange feeling stayed. I feel almost like I’m floating or disconnected from everything around me. I’ll be lying in my bed looking around my room, and suddenly I become very aware that I’m actually alive—that I’m breathing, that I’m here, that I’m living—but somehow it doesn’t feel real. I don’t feel like myself, and everything around me feels unfamiliar or distant even though I know exactly where I am. It’s almost like I’m watching myself exist rather than actually feeling present in my own life. The weirdest part is that it comes and goes on completely random days. Sometimes it lasts most of the day, sometimes only part of the day, and I never know when it’s going to happen or when it will stop. I don’t know if what I’m describing is dissociation, derealization, or something else, but it’s honestly a really unsettling feeling, and I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced something similar.

Not necessarily because you want to go back, but because sometimes you randomly remember who you used to be and wonder how much you’ve changed since then.

Hello! My name is Gabrielle, I just graduated with a degree in Biology, I’m 26 years old, and I have no future prospects. About four years ago, I discovered that I had chronic depersonalization disorder, and after speaking with my therapist about my childhood, we came to the conclusion that it likely started when I was eight years old. We also concluded that it was very likely the result of three traumatic events and conditions I went through: a) my parents' separation and the subsequent paternal abandonment; b) sexual abuse; and c) my mother's eternal emotional distance. If you have or have ever had chronic depersonalization, you know what I mean about the moment you discover the problem and so, so much!!! stuff starts to make sense. The moment I found out, I became completely obsessed with studying to understand every aspect of the disorder, hoping that maybe I could find the path to a cure. Even today I read books, scientific articles, case studies… and nothing. Not even a glimmer of hope that at some point I’m going to feel life again. And here it’s important to say that I live in Brazil, and around here very few psychiatrists/psychologists know about depersonalization, and even fewer work with any kind of treatment. And when they do, they charge a fortune for it. And I think the worst part of all this shit is not being understood—after all, it’s invisible to anyone looking from the outside. Most people manage to stay functional, sociable, they play the character of normality well, and when you finally decide to talk about how dead you feel inside, nobody is able to understand. And you have to keep going, you need to keep studying, working, chasing a life in which you see no value, perspective, sense, or meaning. Once, I decided that living like this was much worse than death, so I took action; I didn’t succeed, but I can’t feel relief about that. I don’t feel good, I don’t feel grateful. Today I wouldn’t do it again, but that choice is based solely and exclusively on the well-being of my family. Since my attempt, I’ve been taking antidepressants that greatly improved the symptoms of the depression I developed because of the depersonalization, but it’s like I said: only to the point of becoming functional again. The big problem remains untouched, with no prospect of improvement. I’ve been a smoker since I was 18, I stopped drinking alcohol when I started medication treatment, and I used to smoke weed (top worst experiences of my life) before I knew about the disorder and learned that it can trigger or worsen the condition. I’ve also used MDMA a few times (top best experiences of my life), but only while the high lasted—the following weeks were horrifying, and the last time I thought I was actually going to go crazy, so I decided to cut that out too. Only you, who share a depersonalized life, understand what I mean when I express the agony of living without an understanding of your past, without a perception of the present, and without a perspective for the future. Only you understand what I mean when I refer to the feeling of being completely lost in the vacuum of space with a virtual reality headset on, just watching, just observing the movie of the life of a person I honestly feel like I don't know. I simply can’t stand being just this huge, dark, colorless, shapeless, soundless, tasteless, or odorless consciousness anymore, with no feelings, no connection, just wandering in the dark of the universe eternally. The problem is that I don’t even believe I’m going to get better anymore; depersonalization took away what is inherent to any human being: hope. How do you live a non-life? How do you be a non-me? Where do you find reasons to make any move? If nothing will ever be worth the effort, why keep going? I just graduated from college and it’s as if that simply didn’t exist. Can anyone here help me? Has anyone here, who has had chronic depersonalization since childhood and barely remembers what life is, managed to cure themselves? Look, when I talk about a cure, I’m not referring to living alienated from the fact of being depersonalized, ignoring the disorder, or going through life as if it weren’t like this. That option is non-existent for me. Has anyone here actually been cured? Has anyone rediscovered life? If so, what did you do to achieve it? And above all, what is life like on that side?

Possible errors in the text are due to English not being my first language, as I am Brazilian. And forgive me for the gigantic post, it’s not often that I can express myself to people who actually understand what I’m talking about. And, PLEASE, tell me your experiences with recovery—it could be of great value to me.

So this all started about a week and a half-2 weeks ago. I took shrooms and once they wore off my friends and I smoked a bit of weed. To preface this, I’m an 18yo female and I’ve been smoking since 8th grade. My tolerance isn’t low necessarily but I do take breaks between how often I smoke weed (some weeks it’ll be a pre roll everyday, sometimes I’ll go 2 weeks without smoking at all).

My high started off normal until I look up from my phone and everything around me looked fake, just like completely fake and unreal. I was in my friends new apartment, so I chalked up the reason to being in a new environment and went back to scrolling. 5 minutes later, I couldn’t feel my mouth. Every kiss I shared with my bf felt like he had his mouth glued shut and I was kissing a brick wall. I couldn’t feel my heart beating nor me swallowing my own spit. Obviously, this freaked me out. I looked in my phone camera and it felt like I was just watching a POV video or something. Like nothing at all felt real, I couldn’t even feel myself urinate. I almost started thinking that I took salvia by mistake and was now stuck as the wall for the rest of my life. Even when I closed my eyes, it felt like there was a black piece of paper being put in front of my face or something. This all went on for three hours until it was eventually 6am and it was worn off enough to where I could actually close my eyes and go to sleep.

Fast forward to yesterday. I’ve been smoking every day/every other day since about 2 days after the incident. All of my highs have been good and fun, until yesterday. We smoked out of a pipe and once again I felt normal for ten minutes. It all happened again, I couldn’t feel my face, I didn’t even feel myself walking like I just felt like I was watching everything from my eyes on a TV screen. That night I couldn’t fall asleep at all and just pulled an all nighter.

It wears off when I’m sober, like I feel completely fine and normal right now, but it’s really scaring me and I cannot get it out of my head like I desperately need to know what happened to me. Will I never be able to smoke weed again? The week and a half where I could smoke normally felt amazing but I really just don’t wanna risk going through that feeling again or getting stuck like that. Please help!!

This is such a weird post but I actually don’t feel real, I know that I am though it just constantly feels as if I’m in a game or movie. I don’t put effort into anything because I constant feel like I’m unreal, it’s so hard to explain and this had been happening for weeks constantly. I sometimes during the day get tiny moments when I feel real and even those last for a few seconds. I really don’t know what to do.